Archive of Jun 2010

by SAM ABRAMS Indonesia The Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) accused members of the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) of breaking up a PDI-P meeting in Banyuwangi. PDI-P officials reported that about a dozen Islamic Ummah Forum members, backed by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), denounced the meeting as reunion of former Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) [...]

When hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees flooded across the Chad-Sudan border in 2003, fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Sudanese government and its militia proxies, the U.N. and various aid groups raced to help. Humanitarian workers built a vast and sophisticated network of refugee camps to house as many as 300,000 people. The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world.

The Taliban had them surrounded. It was a clear, moonlit night on March 28 in Dangam district, in the Kunar River valley in eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. Army patrol, from Battle Company, Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry, was caught on a narrow road between two mountain peaks teeming with Taliban fighters. “They hit us from both sides,” First Lieutenant Cris Gasperini, the patrol leader, would recall a few days after the battle.

This article at Ares describes defense contractor Raytheon making the case for using “legacy fighters”in the missile-defense role. The concept, Network-Centric Airborne Defense Element, or “NCADE,” would require a fighter capable of carrying the AIM-120 AMRAAM medium-range air-to-air missile coupled with modern radars.

by KYLE MIZOKAMI * Britain OKs some talks with Taliban * South Korea, Indonesia teaming up to build fifth-generation fighter * Pakistan receives first of new F-16s * Chinese military banned from blogging, making Web pages * Chimpanzees documented making war for territory

In recent years, the Navy has started dispatching dozens of hospital ships — some as big as shopping malls — to aid developing nations. The crews consist of doctors, nurses, engineers, pilots, volunteers, and even acupuncturists, all there to help. But as Mental Floss reporter David Axe learned while visiting the Kearsarge ship in Nicaragua, the Nashville in Gabon and the Comfort in Panama, these missions aren’t about altruism; they’re about winning friends and influencing nations.

A gray U.S. Air Force tanker banks sharply toward the runway, its four turbofans screaming as it flares for landing. As its tires hit the runway they give off a bluish smoke through which the outline of a U.S. Navy maritime patrol plane taxiing on the tarmac becomes visible.

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